My name is David Rieben and I was born July 29, 1962 in Memphis, TN. I've lived in and around the Memphis area for most of my life. Just about ever since I can remember, I've always had a fascination with electricity, especially high voltage. I can remember in my preteen and teenage years trying to make "sparking machines" out of old ignition coils and even building a Van de Graf electrostatic generator while in high school. It could jump out a good 12" or so on a good cold, dry winter day but of course the current was quite low and it didn't do too well on wet days, either. 

Well, after graduating high school in 1980, I soon decided that my best career option was to join the US Air Force and let them train me in some electronics related field. I enlisted in October, 1981 as a crytographic maintenance specialist (a fancy name for a technician who maintains electronic encryption equipment) and served for nearly four years until I was honorably discharged in September, 1985. Once upon my return home, I found that getting a job in the electronics field in my local area without a college degree was no small task. I had some limited college but certainly no degree. Well, I ended up settling for a factory job in a small town about 40 miles north of Memphis and worked there about three years. In September, 1988, I finally got a job offer with the city of Memphis as a municipal firefighter. This career choice had little to do with my previous career aspirations but it was a decent paying job and I now had family to think about. Well, that's been about 17 years ago now, as of September, 2005, and I'm on my second marriage but I'm still a Memphis firefighter with a mere eight years to go to be eligable for a full retirement pension from the city. So, the professional aspect of my life kind of took a detour from my original ambitions but however, my free time hobbies never waivered from my original fasci- nation with high voltage electrical discharges. 

From my mid 20's onward, I started getting interested in building a large Tesla coil. I had heard that if you wanted to make really lonngg sparks, then a Tesla coil was the way to go about that. Well, back in the 80's and early 90's, with the exception of the Tesla Coil Builder's Associa- tion (TCBA) started by Harry Goldman in 1982, there was little reliable information on the theory and construction of Tesla coils. Remember, this was also before the wide accessibility of the internet or even home computers. I would search the library for what information that I could find on it, but this really left much to be desired. I finally discovered and signed up with the TCBA around 1994 and quickly absorbed all of the information that I could from these quarterly newsletters. I found these simple documents a true goldmine of the information that I had been searching so long for. Although I had succesfully built a few coils prior to this time, it was only through a whole lot of trial and error experi- mentation that I was finally able to get some sparks. I was able to get "on the mark" a lot faster with the information that I was able to glean from these precious documents. I soon built a coil that could produce five foot sparks. First it was five foot sparks, then six foot, then seven foot, oh boy! Every time I would achieve longer sparks, pretty soon I was wanting even longer ones. I was hopelessly hooked! 

Well, every quarterly update of the TCBA would feature a Tesla coil project of one of the fellow members with a brief description and sometimes a few photos of the coil and even some spark photos. Well, I finally come across one quarterly where the featured project was a huge Tesla coil with a 12" x 48" top load toroid and a 24" dia- meter secondary coil wound on a cardboard concrete former tube. It was powered by a 10 KVA, 14,400 volt pole mount distribution transformer, aka "pole pig" and produced 10 foot spark discharges. WOW! 

That was love at first sight for me! I knew that I had to somehow se- cure myself a pole pig. Well, it took me a few years but in March, 2000, I finally got myself one! By this time, I had already built just the coil to fire off with this newly aquired transformer and had already test fired it with a pair of recently aquired seriesed 7200/120 volt GE potential tranformers (PT's). It was already kicking out the biggest sparks that I had made to date (around eight feet) and the addition of the pole pig really fattened up the sparks and made them reach out to nearly 10 feet! WOW! and all of this spark action was being con- tained inside a 12ft x 24ft shed! Yes, I did slowly splinter up a few of the ceiling rafters with these massive discharges, but oh what fun! 

It was also around this same time frame that we finally caught up to the 21st centruy and got a home computer and internet service, Once on line, I promptly searched the web until I discovered the Pupman Tesla Coil Mailing List (TCML) and I of course, signed up. Well, thanks to the TCML owner Chip Atkinson and moderator Terry Fritz, I suddenly found myself with access to a seemingly endless plethora of Tesla coil based information! Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! I was getting more pertinent Tesla coil information from my computer screen each day than I had previ- ously been able to get with months of library research. And the timing was good since the TCBA author Harry Goldman decided to retire the newsletter in 2002. I now had another source of infor- mation to replace the void left by the absence of the TCBA news- letter. 

It was now obvious that I had reached the limits of my overhead and horizontal clearances as well as my electrical service capa- bilities. My coil at this time had a 12" x 38.5" long secondary coil wound with #16 AWG magnet wire for about 660 turns and the primary was seven turns of 5/8" OD copper tubing with 5/8" spacing between adjacent turns. I had a 9" x 30" toroid top load. We relocated to the suburbs in December, 2002 and I found my- self with an overhead garage door opener mechanism and only eight feet of overhead clearance, so inside firing was now out of the question. It had to be drug outside on the driveway to fire now. I did however have better electrical service available in the new home with up-to-date code electrical service. 

Up until now, my main objective had been to just get sparks and not to worry much about asthetic appearance of the coil. It was then that I began to want to build a better quality and even larger coil than I had built to date. I decided to pay closer attention to asthetic as well as functional details to make the coil more pre- sentable. Thus the idea of the Green Monster was born. Since there was no way that I would be able to operate this beast any where near my house, much less inside my garage (yep, I found out all about that the hard way), I also decided to make this coil tall enough to suppress the tendency for the sparks to strike at the primary strike rail, but yet keep the vertical height low enough that I could at least store it inside the garage. I also had to make the toroid terminal removable so that it could be taken off to allow the 94" tall (when fully assembled) unit to pass underneath the 81" vertical clearance of the garage door opening. I also had to build a better quality rotary spark gap that could handle the huge primary circuit currents without danger of "meltdown" or shake apart when brought up to operational speed. Well, as they say, the rest is history and here are the results of my "dream".